Word: lawtey
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who, like his brother President George W. Bush, has made faith-based initiatives a staple of his conservative social policy, is such a big fan of the Lawtey program that he has already duplicated it at a new women's facility at Hillsborough Correctional Institution, near Tampa. But the approach has its detractors. Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (A.C.L.U.) have warned that it may violate church-state separation. Governor Bush responds that Lawtey and Hillsborough use only private funding for their religious programs--and says they offer equitable access to 31 faiths, including Baptist...
Corrections officials also insist that inmates have to raise their hand to be at Lawtey and that more than 100 prisoners at the facility who wanted out of the experiment were moved to other institutions in December. Those places were quickly filled by inmates from other facilities who, like Newton, say they're looking for a more meaningful way to spend their prison time than lifting weights. The religious alternative seems to be working. Assistant warden John Hancock says Lawtey's confinement wing for inmates with discipline problems usually held close to its capacity of 28 prisoners, but now rarely...
During a tightly controlled press tour of Lawtey last week, inmates told TIME that it's easier to contemplate the straight and narrow when your cellblock feels like an episode of Touched by an Angel instead of Oz. "The difference between this and my last prison, where I was mixed in with violent criminals, is heaven and hell," says Dana Chaison, 51, a convicted drug offender and Roman Catholic. "It's kind of hard to focus on your rehab when you're always watching your back." Bossard Shawn, 32, says he saw his Muslim chaplain so infrequently at his former...
...prisons that make faith their core corrections criterion. "We're glad the Governor wants to improve Florida's brutal prison conditions," says Simon, "but not under the condition that religious indoctrination has to be involved." A.C.L.U. lawyers are studying the extent of direct or even indirect government funding for Lawtey's religion-based activities before deciding whether to file suit against the program. Simon and other critics also complain that Bush unveiled the faith-based-prison concept last year at the same time the state was slashing more than $20 million from secular prison-rehabilitation programs...
Still, religion-based rehab programs seem to inspire a loyal following. After Ken Cooper, 66, was paroled in 1987 from a life sentence for a string of armed bank robberies, he "received a new life sentence" to minister to inmates, he says, and is now a Christian volunteer at Lawtey. "For the criminal type," says Cooper, "getting him to relate to an authority higher than himself is often the only...